It started with an ominous email: “We urge New Zealanders currently travelling overseas to consider returning home while commercial options remain available,” the foreign affairs ministry wrote.
For citizens of the nation at the bottom of the world, long-haul travel can be stressful at the best of times – returning from the northern hemisphere usually takes a full 24 hours, including multiple stopovers.
New Zealanders have since reported tearful and angry scenes at London’s Heathrow airport as travellers attempted to board flights home but were barred from doing so.
“When we arrived at the airport, we found out only people who had American visas or green cards, if you were going through Los Angeles, would be able to get on the plane,” one traveller, Haydn Read, told Radio New Zealand.
Donald Trump has instituted a travel ban on travellers from Britain and Europe. Those barred from the flight panicked because the London to Los Angeles route on Air New Zealand – the country’s national carrier – is due to halt on Friday.
The disputes as passengers attempted to push into queues for tickets with other airlines were “in some cases, physical”, Read wrote in a post on LinkedIn.
“There is a burgeoning question from me to our government about the hundreds, even thousands who will/cannot get home,” he wrote. “I would like to see Air NZ, with backing from the government come and get anyone who wants/needs to get home.”
‘Less nervous about travelling than about staying’
Consular advisers based in Wellington and overseas were “responding to large numbers of enquiries from New Zealanders facing unprecedented global travel disruptions,” said Kimberley Rothwell, a spokesperson for the agency.
Winston Peters, the foreign minister, said on Wednesday work had begun on alternative plans – including the use of charter planes – but urged the at least 80,000 New Zealanders overseas to “get home now”, according to RNZ.
Air New Zealand announced Monday that it would drastically cut its global routes by 85% in the coming months. In New York on Wednesday, New Zealanders Jessica Lightfoot and James Graham booked tickets home to Auckland for 29 March at double the normal price, crossing their fingers that services would still be running.
Their US visas run out in May, they said, so they knew they needed to head home – but could not leave immediately because they had lived in New York for years and faced frantic days of packing up their apartment and selling their furniture ahead of schedule.
“We’ve got all this food in the freezer and we might not have time to eat it all,” Lightfoot said.
The pair had looked at fares last week “just to have a look,” she said. “They were a lot cheaper before these airlines said they were going to cut all the routes.”
When the Guardian spoke to New Zealanders returning to Wellington as they arrived home on Tuesday – before the government issued its advice – the travellers spoke of near-empty planes and whole rows of seats to themselves.
Now, Graham said, the tickets cost “typical Christmas prices” as demand suddenly surged.
“Suppose we were going home to Europe, there’s a hundred flights we could catch with a hundred airlines,” Graham said. “But what airline is going to step in to get New Zealanders home if Air New Zealand went under?”
The pair was already in self-isolation, and Lightfoot worried that if New Yorkers were asked to “shelter in place” – meaning people could not leave their homes unless for essential reasons – they might not be able to get a taxi to the airport. “I’m already calling our current situation Escape from New York,” she said.
While they had some nerves about becoming unwell during the long trip, Lightfoot said, she was “less nervous about travelling than I am about staying.”
Waiting it out
But for some, the distance between the northern hemisphere and New Zealand – and the number of flight changes and airport stopovers required – proved prohibitive, despite the government’s advice.
Rebeccah Wright, of Christchurch, who works in a hotel in the middle of a national park in Montana, said she had decided not to return home, preferring to “wait it out” until her visa expires at the end of June.
Wright was in remission for cancer, she said, and – even after learning of the New Zealand government’s advice – did not want to risk becoming unwell during the long trip home.
“Radiation treatment did a number on my lungs,” she said, adding that she always gets sick after flying. “I don’t yet know how all those treatments affected my body and immune system, but I do know last year it took me three weeks to get over a simple cold.”
But Wright was prepared to change plans at short notice. “This is the kind of decision I’ll be thinking about every minute of every day now while things are so unknown,” she said.
